Ghost Pages: A Wired.com Farewell to GeoCities

Before iPods and Y2K, GeoCities was a quantum leap: The average person could create a web site for free, no questions asked. People took the opportunity and ran with it, building millions of pages –- 38 million at last count, according to Yahoo. They helped make the web a more vibrant territory, no longer the citadel of nerds in the know.

When news of Geocities’ imminent demise hit the web in April, groups of online archivists started downloading pages to their own computers, racing to save as many as possible before midnight Oct. 26, when the lights went off for good. Though the tally is not final, the archivists estimate they salvaged at least a million sites. A few of these digital museums have already opened their doors, including geocities.ws and reocities.com, and several others are coming soon.

This gallery presents small portions of a few sites, to commemorate the high and low points in GeoCities history — a world that won’t be entirely lost, thanks to Archive Team and others. But it will never again be just a click away.

[Ed. note: This trip down memory lane includes a pop-up dialog box and some self-starting sound files. That’s the way it was.]

Above:

Boingo

The confessional quality of the internet was alive and kicking on GeoCities. You never had to see the people on the other end of the conversation, and things you might not have told your best friend were suddenly available for all to see.

Jason Scott and his group Archive Team, with help from Archive.org and other like-minded folks, deployed web crawlers in April to start raking the net. “It’s a weird archeological dig,” says Scott.

Scott is unsure about why Yahoo chose Oct. 26 as doomsday, but both he and his Archive Team colleague Steve Webb suspect that Yahoo won’t just take down the service, but actually delete the data, possibly to protect themselves from liability.

Yahoo hasn’t been forthcoming about its plans. Webb has exchanged emails with Yahoo employees for months, without much response.

Above:

Michael Jackson

Fan pages of all sorts abounded, and before Myspace, GeoCities was a good way to go. Users could add music, short movies, and even host chat rooms for fellow fans.

Looking at a GeoCities page can be a little embarrassing, akin to a picture of yourself strutting in the now-ridiculous fashions of decades past. Like plaid flair pants or a Dave Matthews album, GeoCities pages can spur flashbacks to a different era.

We’ve gotten used to polished web design and intuitive user interfaces. These days Geocities’ trademark blinking-Christmas-tree-on-shrooms animations may induce a seizure. But for a generation of internet users whose online adolescence overlapped with the GeoCities heyday, they are a cultural relic that must be preserved.

For those nostalgic for the famed “Under Construction” GIFs, Scott has amassed a formidable collection. Take 10 steps back from your monitor before viewing.

Above:

Hearse Club

GeoCities midwifed another aspect of the internet that we now take for granted: truly obscure groups making themselves known to the world. The wide spectrum of human behavior was on display as never before. Take, for example, the home page of a club of hearse collectors in New Zealand.

“There are some stupid people in the tech industry who think of stuff purely as a matter of cost-benefit legality, and not that they are in fact keepers of other people’s data,” Scott laments. “They don’t think about the repercussions of storing decades of work and history.”

Scott’s larger project is to change the way society thinks about user data. “I want the same protections afforded to housed online data done by users that we afford people’s homes and rentals,” he explains.

In his ideal world there would be legal mandates that would require hosts to give adequate warning and ample opportunity for users to download their data before it is consigned to binary oblivion. “Right now we get anything from a one-year warning to a one-minute warning.”

Until the new dispensation arrives, Archive Team has made a simple commitment: “We are going to rescue your shit.”

Above:

Drunk-Driver Victim Memorial

Perhaps the most poignant part of the GeoCities shutdown is the disappearance of so many online memorials, sites clearly built with tenderness and care by people in the throes of grief. In part, these sites answered the questions that come to mind when looking at an unfamiliar headstone: Who were you? How did you live? How did you die? Now many will be effaced, though that is inevitable, of course, in a real cemetery or a digital one.

The organization of GeoCities was itself an artifact of the “information superhighway” metaphor. The name suggests an older way of thinking about web pages, an attempt to help users navigate the teeming virtual landscape by applying an artificial geography to web pages.

GeoCities was divided into “neighborhoods,” groups of sites with similar content, which were further subdivided into “suburbs” and blocks.

The designation of a particular site was found in the first part of its URL, so shopping sites often started with “RodeoDrive,” movie pages with “Hollywood.” Some neighborhoods bore the name of a real-world city relevant to their topic: “Vienna,” for classical music. Sites with gay and lesbian content, which helped establish the web as a way for those communities to connect, went by “WestHollywood.” Other neighborhoods playfully evoked the pages’ common themes: PicketFence for home improvement buffs, HotSprings for fitness fanatics.

Above:

Prison Murder

Extremists, fringe groups and causes you never heard of coalesced online, and GeoCities was no exception. However, many will recall that one of Geocities’ quirks was the mismatch of music and images: midi versions of Beatles songs playing over a page about people murdered in prison, for example.

Users coined the term “homesteading” to describe the process of situating a new site within the GeoCities topography. Volunteer “community leaders,” who oversaw the respective neighborhoods in the early days, guided newbies into their online homes.

Yahoo eventually phased out the neighborhood system, providing new pages with URLs based on personal user names (leaving the original neighborhoods intact) and abolishing self-regulation. The homesteading spirit lived on, however, and GeoCities continued as primordial version of the everyman’s internet of blogs and Twitter feeds. The personal pages of today are even easier to set up, requiring no knowledge of HTML, and thanks to standard formats, they don’t look like 10 slot machines trying to burst out of the browser.

Above:

Pamela Anderson

For lonely bachelors, the web offered a whole new medium of relief. Pamela Anderson — more specifically, her honeymoon sex tape — has been cited as a major force in bringing new users to the net.

According to an article posted on ZDNet in 1999, contemporary analysts counted 145,000 individual sites that included Anderson’s name, often just a bait-and-switch used to entice customers to click. That amounted to 0.1 percent of all the sites indexed by search engine AltaVista. As the song from Avenue Q goes, “The internet is for porn.” Soft-core, in the case of Geocities.

Wired.com feels obligated to keep the autoplay of sound files intact upon loading the page, to give an authentic farewell.

90210

GeoCities websites run the gamut from simplicity to madness. Many users were quick to discover the plethora of ready-made animations, Day-Glo fonts and baroque backgrounds that were available at the time. They went wild, resulting in the visual equivalent of panic: sites so overbuilt that they were unreadable.

ASCII Animation

ASCII began long before Geocities, but these strangely lifelike stick-figure animations were the subject of several online compendiums. There was a lot of dark and disinhibited humor in these digital flip books, not to mention a mind-bending number of keystrokes.

Ryan

Elegant in its simplicity: High school senior Ryan Akers (aka raiden) documents his legendary yearbook picture.

Before social networking sites, GeoCities gave kids with a computer, or a computer lab at school, an early foothold online. Having a web page back then was no way to meet girls: That was what chat rooms were for.